


A Study on the Composition of Nightmares

by ismaene



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abuse, Bisexual Remus Lupin, Child Abuse, Everyone Needs A Hug, Injury, M/M, Marauders, Marauders' Era, Sirius Black & James Potter Friendship, Sirius Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 18:05:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4676228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ismaene/pseuds/ismaene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius Black goes to sleep and the world is falling around him. Sirius Black wakes up and isn't sure he can take this for much longer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Study on the Composition of Nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> Huge TW for discussions of child abuse

Year One  
_“Crucio!”_  
He feels his body go strangely limp and braces for pain to shoot through his nerves, but nothing comes. Instead, all he feels is a slight tickle in his side. Somewhere in the background, there are shrieks. Somewhere, far away, he hears a voice pleading for him, begging him to help, to make it go away. He is limp and his hands, he now realizes, are tied behind him. He struggles but the more he tries the harder it gets. The strange sensation at his side gets harder. He tries to move his head to see but he can’t and the voice is still calling. “Sirius, please, Sirius, help!”  
“Sirius, help! Sirius, oh no!” Another voice, mocking and derisive, cuts through his brain. His hands clench around the edges of tick carpet His hands meet another hand, a warm hand, and grasp it. No, that can’t be right—the carpet is gone, and he is falling, falling with nothing but the hand in his own and the ringing voice in his ears.  
He turns his head, in the vast emptiness, and in front of him are his brother’s eyes, his brother’s face. He is shaking against Sirius’s side, trembling and sobbing. He is pale, mouthing Sirius’s name over and over again through trembling lips. There is blood matted in his dark hair. That doesn’t add up. It’s wrong, all wrong, so wrong, but he can’t do anything. His hands are free. He grabs Regulus and holds him tight as they fall together.  
Something changes.  
The body he is holding grows and when Sirius draws away it is not Regulus that he sees, but their father. His heart is pounding like it wants to beat right through his skin, beat into his father’s chest and latch on and siphon the blood from his very veins, but it stays put. His father raises his hand and yells the curs again and this time the pain comes and it’s spreading through him and lighting up each and every synapse in each and every part of his body and he screams and screams but nothing can stop it and he’s falling down, down, down into emptiness and fear, and—  
“Sirius, wake up!”  
His eyes snap open, and the room gradually materializes around him. There is a low guttural noise that he can’t place until he realizes that it’s coming from his own throat. He breathes and gulps down air and the sound stops. His fists are clenched. He gradually unfolds them and sees blood forming in his palm.  
“Sirius, mate, are you alright?”  
Sirius nods. His throat is still unable to provide words. He breathes or a moment, and then tries to crack a smile. “Yeah, I’m fine. Nightmare.”  
On the other side of the room, Kingsley still looks worried. “You were thrashing about. Are you sure?”  
“I’m fine,” Sirius says again, and lies back onto his pillows. “It was a dream about Quidditch. I fucking fell off my stupid broom.”  
James laughs and lies back down. The light is turned off after a fair bit of scuffling around in the dark, and Sirius closes his eyes until he hears heavy breathing surrounding him. Then he opens his eyes, stares at the wall, and doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night.  
In the morning, everybody seems to have forgotten what happened. 

Year Two  
_His feet are freezing. He looks down and realizes that they’re packed in snow. He withdraws them and sees blood covering them._  
A few feet to the left, there is a door. His mother enters. She’s singing something, but whatever it is, Sirius is pretty sure he’s never heard it before. His mother draws closer and he flinches and pulls away.  
“Shh,” she whispers, one finger to her lips. She sits down in the snow next to him.  
“Why are you being nice?” he whispers, and she slaps him across the face.  
“Better?” she hisses.  
He looks down at the snow and for the first time, he wonders why it’s there. The thought slips from his mind as soon as he thinks it.  
“Your father had a bad day today,” his mother says, standing up. “He wants to see you.”  
“Why?” the word slips out before he can stop it.  
“Don’t question me,” she snaps, and storms out the door. Sirius stands and follows her.  
Suddenly, he’s at his father’s door. He’s not entirely sure how he got here, but he pushes the door open and steps in. His father sits in the center of the room at the desk, but instead of a body there is simply a swirling back mass. He feels mild alarm at this, but nothing much. The mass moves closer. Sirius takes a step back but he’s locked in place. He feels around for his wand but it’s gone. The mass comes closer and envelops him and it’s piercing him, it’s a thousand daggers and he is standing in the middle and he can do nothing nothing nothing to make it go away.   
James is the first to his bed, and then Remus and the Peter. James hold his hands to keep him from scratching anything and Remus holds tight to his shoulders and Peter casts a muffliato charm around the bed to keep anybody else from waking up. He wakes up slowly, and when he finally can breathe again he expects them to ask questions. The thought flashes through his mind that perhaps he’s too weak to lie, but he brushes it away as absurd.  
He doesn’t need to lie, not in the end. They sit with him for what must be hours, and James holds his hand and Remus squeezes his shoulder and Peter has one hand on his arm and they stay like that. Nobody talks. They don’t need to. Eventually, they get up and go back to their beds. Sirius stares out into the room and he can swear that Peter is also awake, watching from the darkness to make sure that he’s alright. 

Year Three  
_Again, Sirius finds himself bound and tied to a bedpost as they hurt his brother. Again, there’s nothing he can do. Regulus screams as it happens, and Sirius is sure that somebody outside will hear and come in, but nobody does._  
It must be hours later that Regulus is slumped on the floor and half dead in front of them. His mother releases his from his bonds and hands him his wand. Sirius walks over to his brother on the floor and wants nothing more than t lie down next to him, hold him tell him everything will be okay. ‘  
Instead—and every part of his brain screams in protest—he points his wand. This is wrong. This is WRONG. No, a voice from deep in his mind says. This is right.  
“Crucio,” a voice says, and this time the voice is Sirius and Regulus is writhing on the floor and Sirius is laughing with his mother and father and, the voice whispers, this is how it’s supposed to be.   
He wakes up on his own this time, breathing heavily. His stomach twists over on itself and he retches over the side of the bed. He feels a hand against him, and he flinches and turns to see Remus gently patting his back. Remus, who sometimes cries in sleep, himself. He gives a weak smile and that’s all he can do. He is bone dead, bone tired. Everything takes energy and he has non left. He feels nothing as Remus pulls him up gently and guides him out of bed, down the dark hallways, and into the loo. He vaguely registers the feeling of cold tile against his face, the scent of his own sweat of vomit, the way that Remus smells of nutmeg and black tea when he gets close.  
“Let me get you a new shirt,” Remus whispers, and disappears for a moment, returning with a fresh nightshirt and a glass of water. Sirius hastily downs the water and is glad when his stomach accepts it. He tugs at his stained shirt, but can’t quite get it over his head. Remus pull sit the rest of the way for him. His eyes are closed but he hears Remus’s sudden intake of breath when he sees the scars that mar Sirius’s abdomen. He hears mater running and a cold cloth on his face. Remus kneels down beside him (nutmeg and tea again) and takes his hand.  
“Do you want to talk about it?”  
Sirius, finally able to summon the energy to move, shakes his head.  
“You need to talk to somebody.”  
“How—“his voice is rough and he clears his throat. “How do you know?”  
“That you need to talk to somebody? Or… the other thing?”  
The silence is painfully loud. “I said I didn’t want to talk,” Sirius says, a bit rougher than he intended but it gets the point across.  
Remus just sits there. “Sirius, mate, come on. Just tell me what you were dreaming about.”  
“Fucks sake, it was nothing.”  
“You were muttering your brother’s, um, his name, I just thought—I,” the sentence trails off into nothingness.  
“I’m a monster,” Sirius mutters. Remus chuckles and Sirius can’t think why the hell he’d be laughing right now, but he is.  
“Sirius, I’m a bloody werewolf,” he says, “You’re no more of a monster than me.” And then Sirius is laughing too, laughing at the absurdity of the situation and they sit there, backs against the tile, holding onto each other’s hands like they’re lifelines and laughing.  
Finally, Remus stands up and offers him a hand but he shrugs it away. They walk down the hallway again and creep into the room. In the dark, Remus let’s go of Sirius’s hand, but before he can pull away, he whispers sharply, “I really don’t think you could be a monster.” Sirius climbs into bed and tries not to sleep. On the other side of the room he can hear Remus crying softly into his pillow. 

Year Four  
_James is standing in front of him and bleeding profusely from a wound to the chest. Sirius kneels over him and presses his hands to the cut but the blood keeps coming and he can’t stop it._  
James stares at him. His eyes are filled with an emotion that Sirius doesn’t quite recognize. He tries harder to stop the bleeding but nothing helps. He desperately looks around for his wad but it’s nowhere to be found and James is on the floor, paler by the second  
“Stay with me, James,” he says.  
James groans. He’s so pale. Sirius feels tears welling up in his eyes but he can’t do anything to stop them from bursting out without taking his hands off James. James’s breathing is ragged. He inhales, and, with the last of his breath whispers coarsely in Sirius’s ear. “You fucking thought we cared about you.”  
Sirius stop his screams before they come from his chest. Everybody is still asleep. He can’t help but look to the other side of the room. James is still there, breathing heavily in the darkness.  
Tears well up in his chest and he sobs into his pillow so that he doesn’t make noise. He falls asleep again to the sound of Peter snoring softly and doesn’t say anything about the dream. 

Year Five  
He wakes up suddenly with a gasp of breath and he can’t remember what he was dreaming, but there is an impending feeling of terror pressing into his chest and he has to do something about it. He slips out of bed and into the common room and curls up in the big armchair by the window and presses his fists into her eyes until he sees sparks. Outside, rain is pouring down, turning the lake into a maelstrom and the grounds into a vat of mud. Tomorrow there will be mud fights and somebody will dare somebody else to try to swim and somebody will make it back to shore just barely, coughing and spluttering and laughing like a fucking maniac.  
Sirius Black stretches his neck. The feeling of fear is almost gone but there’s an odd tingling in his stomach that he can’t make go away. It’s the reverse of the feeling that he got that time in second year when he and Peter snuck into the kitchen late at night and ate a cake, just the two of them, sitting there among the pots and pans and mountains of food. He cannot describe that feeling just like he cannot describe this one, but he knows somehow there they are polar opposites.  
He can’t remember his dream and he supposes that he should be thankful for that, but as he looks out at the rainy sky, the now-soaked Hogwarts grounds, the Quidditch pitch, gleaming in the distance, he wants nothing more than to know what happened, if only so that he could make himself stop wondering. 

Year Six  
_He is running quickly but his feet won’t work. The landscape around him keeps changing. Quicksand, a forest, mud—he cannot move quickly enough to keep away from the unknown enemy behind him. He doesn’t know what it is but he knows that he has to keep running._  
Is feet are trapped in tree roots. He struggles to get free and then he feels the skin on his back split. There is warm blood running down his back, matting in his hair, falling to the ground around him. He sinks deeper into the roots. His back aches and more splits appear over his body, his skin trying to fall away from bone, his body trying to rebel against its own cover. He screams, and the world around him goes dark. He screams, and everything he knows is gone.   
It takes him a few moments to realize where he is. The boy lying in bed next to him is groggily shaking him. That’s James, he realizes, and this is James’s house and room and James’s parents are sleeping in the room next door. He pushing his face into his pillow to muffle any noise he might be making, terrified that he’ll wake them up, that they’ll throw him out, push him away, make him go back…  
James is still shaking him slightly. He pulls Sirius up from the pillows and grabs one of his hands. “Hey,” he says, “hey, just breathe.”  
Sirius tries. He grabs the side of the bed and tries to make his heaving lungs calm down, but he can’t do anything.  
James turns on a light. Sirius realizes with a start that the sheets are bloody. He touches his back and his hand comes away warm and wet. He really is bleeding. “Oh, god,” he gasps. “I fucked it up. I fucked up, I’m sorry, god, I’m sorry…”  
“For what?” James retreats into the bathroom off his bedroom and Sirius hears the water running.  
“I messed up your sheets.” The words seems stupid and Sirius says them but he knows that this isn’t okay, that he did something wrong.  
“Calm down. There’s this thing called magic that can be used to clean things?”  
Sirius tries to smile but he just grimaces. His back is on fire. He touches his side again and realizes that his bandages must have come undone while he was sleeping.  
James returns with a wet towel and more bandages. Sirius sits up and lets James was off his back. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I sort of fucked up your summer, I guess.”  
“Are you kidding?”  
Sirius doesn’t say anything. James finishes with the towel and begins to wrap the bandages again, securing them more tightly this time. “Sirius,” he says, “I’m glad you came. We want you here, you’re my best mate, do you really think you’re a burden?”  
Sirius nods slightly. James wraps the bandage once more and secures it.  
“Besides, you’re better off here where you’re not nearly getting almost killed every few days.” James helps Sirius stand up and strips the sheets off the bed.  
Sirius exhales quickly. “I didn’t know where else to go.” The words are so quiet, but James hears them and smiles.  
“I’m glad you didn’t go anywhere else.”  
“They were going to kill me, James, I swear, they—“he hates the hysterical tones in his voice, hates the way is shakes and quivers, hates the words he’s saying.  
“It’s okay. You’re okay now. “  
James turns the light back off and falls asleep again quickly. Sirius lays back on the pillow and closes his eyes, but sleep refuses to come. 

Year Seven  
_He is Padfoot and the world is new. Smells, sounds, everything is overwhelming and different and beautiful. He smells Remus from a distance and bounds toward him, the hair on his back prickling from the mix of excitement and fear coursing through his veins._  
Remus, in human form, is standing in the grass and Padfoot jumps towards him, grinning his dog smile with his tongue hanging from the right side of his mouth. He is Sirius again now, his feet dragging him down and the world a mute canvas, no longer the thrilling ride it was just a moment ago. But there is Remus, Remus in his old purple sweater, Remus, biting his lip just a little, his freckles standing out like tiny stars against the paleness of his skin. He pulls Sirius forward and hold him close. He is so thin, Sirius can feel his ribs pressing into his chest.  
Remus kisses his neck softly, his tongue flicking slowly and lazily over Sirius’s collarbone, his hands moving down Sirius’s chest to unzip his jeans…  
Sirius looks up into the sky. The moon is shining in the darkness, just a crescent now, but as he watches it shifts into a vague resemblance of his mother. She is whispering something and he stains to hear it. “Traitor, traitor, filth…” Her voice carries on the wind.  
He shuts his eyes and tries to block her voice but he can’t. He looks down and immediately feels a sharp pain in his side. His eyes focus in the darkness and when they do he doesn’t see Remus anymore. Instead, his father is there, holding him close and digging a sharp knife in between his ribs. He gasps and the world swirls around him—  
He is slightly disoriented when he wakes up. His heart is beating too fast and he’s drenched in sweat, but he seems to be okay. He pushes himself out of bed and heads down to the common room.  
Remus is sitting in the big chair by the fire. Sirius wasn’t expecting that and almost turn aroun. Instead, he walks slowly over and sits down next to him.  
“Hallo,” Remus says softly. “You alright?”  
“Yeah. Bad dream,” Sirius says. He blinks hard, trying to get the image of Remus kissing his neck out of his mind. “You?”  
“Just couldn’t sleep.”  
The silence in comfortable. The fire pops and crackles slowly. Sirius clears his throat and Remus starts.  
“What were you dreaming about?” he asks.  
Sirius goes red and is extremely thankful that it’s mostly dark. “You.”  
“Oh. And it was bad?”  
“That part wasn’t.”  
“What were we doing?”  
Sirius almost tells him. Almost. “I was Padfoot. We were running around outside.” Remus’s freckles are driving him fucking crazy. He still smells like nutmeg and tea. And god, he’s wearing the purple sweater.  
Traitor, his mother whispers, filth.  
“Fuck off,” he mutters.  
“Hm?” Remus looks almost half asleep, silhouetted against the fire.  
“Nothing,” he says. Traitor. Filth.  
He doesn’t know how it happens, but suddenly he is leaning across the space between the two chairs. Suddenly, he is grabbing Remus’s hand, and even more suddenly, he is kissing Remus’s mouth. His lips are soft and full. Remus’s hands are in his hair, on his chest, everywhere…  
He realizes that he is crying.  
Remus draws back. “You sure you’re alright?”  
Sirius laughs a little. “No,” he whispers, and kisses him again, his neck, his shoulders. He doesn’t know if he’s still crying. He doesn’t particularly care.  
Traitor, she whispers. Traitor, traitor, filth!  
He buries himself in Remus’s arms and her whisper fades to nothing. 

Later  
He wakes up in a soft bed, with sunlight pouring in the windows. He vaguely remembers his dream. There was pain, and his mother was somewhere, hovering around the edges like a thick fog that he couldn’t quite shake. He isn’t screaming he realizes. And it’s morning.  
Remus is still breathing deeply next to him. His freckles, scattered so haphazardly against his face, give him a look of innocence as he sleeps. Sirius sort of wants to stay in bed and watch him until he wakes up.  
Instead, he places one hand on Remus shoulder and whispers for him to wake up. There’s a meeting and Dumbledore won’t be happy if they’re late again. Remus stirs below the covers and mutters for a few more minutes of sleep. Outside, there are birds singing in the trees.  
In that moment, Sirius knows that he’ll be okay.


End file.
